1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to manufacturing environments and more specifically to supporting chargeable subcontracting when outsourcing manufacturing of an assembled unit from multiple components.
2. Related Art
Assembled units are often manufactured using multiple components. For example, to manufacture a computer system, a manufacturer may use components such as mother-boards, hard-disks, display panels, key-boards, etc. The assembled units may represent a final product or an intermediate product used in other assembled units.
Manufacturing of assembled units is often outsourced (by an outsourcing organization) to external organizations while supplying at least some of the components. In addition to assembling (putting together) of the components, the external organization may perform various value additions such as further refinement/modification of the components and/or assembled units, etc.
Chargeable subcontracting refers to a business methodology, in which the outsourcing organization ships the components to an external organizations treating that shipment (the physical movement of commodities/items from a supplier location to a customer location) as a sale, receives the assembled units from external organizations while treating that the shipped components are brought back from the external organization and merely pays an amount reflecting the additional value provided by the external organization in manufacturing the assembled units from the shipped components. Such methodology is often employed in countries such as Japan, for various legal and business reasons.
Outsourcing organizations often places several orders according to chargeable subcontracting mode. These orders can be for different assembly types, and sometimes for different number of units at different time points of the same assembly type. In addition, the orders can be to different external organizations.
It is generally desirable that an outsourcing organization be able to maintain various types of information with respect to such orders.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.